Back in 2014 and 2015, when I was living in Minneapolis, I created a small writers group. Monica Gomez-Hira was in the group, and she was working on a funny YA contemporary about a Latinx girl who gets a job as a party princess and has to play Belle opposite her “beastly” ex-boyfriend. Imagine my delight when, years later,… View Post
I was on the phone with a friend the other day, and we got into a discussion about whether the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman is Middle Grade, Young Adult, or possibly adult fantasy. And I realized as we were talking that my friend didn’t quite know the differences among the kidlit genres… which made me think maybe… View Post
Writing a novel-length project is incredibly challenging. How do you keep track of plot points and character arcs, revise and rearrange scenes, organize notes and research? In the past I’ve attempted to do these things with the use of 3-subject notebooks, post-its, highlighters, and lots and lots of Word documents. Then I found a better way: Scrivener. A few months… View Post
What Is a High Concept Book? Recently I’ve been listening to The Manuscript Academy podcast. In each episode, agent Jessica Sinsheimer (creator of The Manuscript Wish List) and author Julie Kingsley interview someone from the publishing industry, usually an agent or editor. Often, the agents and editors say they are looking for books that are “high concept,” but when they’re… View Post
The following is a guest post from Hayley Zelda, who is a writer and marketer at heart. She’s written on all the major writing platforms and worked with a number of self-published authors on marketing books to the YA audience. Whether or not to write fanfiction is an important question for many writers. On one hand, it might seem like an… View Post